Mach was!? (Do something!?) is the title of an old Swabian jazzrock record that pretty much expresses what this blog is about. Its entries talk about the relation between being and becoming, self-actualization and social change. This is how I perceived and questioned reality at each given point in time, not a statement of absolute truth, a call for getting excited, or a reason for feeling criticized personally.
But if you must, you must, of course.

2016-07-25

When you are reading a book like "Born
in Tibet", what you are getting is not so much a description of
the country and its history, but what they meant to Chögyam Trungpa
and how growing up in Tibet felt like to the author. I should warn
you that it is the same with what I am writing here; it cannot
prepare you in any way for what you would see and feel and experience
on coming to Auroville. My writings do not provide you with facts,
either. They rather tell you a lot about what is on the writer's
mind, and what this place means to him (and maybe why he uses to talk
in the third person about himself).

My fellow Aurovilians may back me up on
the fact that, regarding descriptions of the joys and difficulties of
living in Auroville, there is a very close connection between the
observer's world view and their experience of events in this
township. It seems as though Auroville is magnifying psychological
challenges, philosophical puzzles, or, if you prefer to express it in
these terms, karmic conditions which dominate a person's life. One might
say that, in Auroville, you are getting a solid hammering of the
exact issues that call for getting resolved.

The intensity of it all seems
unbearable, even torturous, sometimes. Auroville, some folks
observed, is not exactly the place of smiling people; betrayed of
their dreams and bewildered, many choose to leave. But if one is
willing to face the heat this pressure from an unknown source can
become a powerful drive for working out the issues oneself, finding
out what they mean, overcoming the self-inflicted internal suffering,
and translating all of that into a way of life in a close-knit
community. Irrespective of "Divine Consciousness", "
eternal youth", "human unity" and all the rest of it,
this is, to me, what AV's four-point-charter is all about, and why
the Mother could boil it down to one single, all-inclusive sentence,
"All people of goodwill are welcome"...